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GEORGE LAKEY: I just returned from a research trip to Norway where the people I interviewed often brought up the topic of our new President. The first was Kristin Clemet, the director of a conservative think tank. “This spring on a delegation to Washington I was struck again,” she said, “by how different the political spectrum is in Norway from your country. Here, Obama would be on the right wing.” I checked her view with others — academics, politicians, activists all over the Norwegian spectrum — and all but one agreed. In Norwegian terms, our President’s positions are very conservative.

KATHY KELLY: In early June, 2009, I was in the Shah Mansoor displaced persons camp in Pakistan, listening to one resident detail the carnage which had spurred his and his family’s flight there a mere 15 days earlier. Their city, Mingora, had come under massive aerial bombardment. He recalled harried efforts to bury corpses found on the roadside even as he and his neighbors tried to organize their families to flee the area.

BILL SCHEURER: Major Tammy Duckworth hobbled to the podium on her own power – aided by prosthetic devices in both her legs and one arm. An Iraq War veteran who was severely injured in battle and now serves as Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs, she spoke of one of her comrades who arrived first on the scene after the helicopter she was piloting had been shot down with a rocket-propelled grenade.